Redis has announced the next chapter of Redis Iris, its real-time context engine for AI agents. The update, unveiled on November 4, 2026, organizes the product into six capabilities that can be used together or independently, aiming to take agents from prototype to production with memory, context, routing, and communication.
Six capabilities, one runtime
Four capabilities are already generally available (GA): Intent Router, Agent Playbooks, Agent Memory, and Context Gateway. Two more, Lens and Agent Mesh, arrive in beta.
- Intent Router: classifies a request by its meaning rather than its exact wording, then routes it to a remembered FAQ answer, a skill, a person, or a language model.
- Agent Playbooks: defines which stable answers can be reused and which need current data and a fresh run of a known procedure. Playbooks get more thorough and accurate the more they run, cutting resolution times and token spend.
- Agent Memory: builds memories from user actions, documents, and other semi-structured data through MemoryETL, organized in hierarchies with inspection, audit, and provenance — and it can forget what it should not keep, such as personally identifiable information.
- Context Gateway: gives agents a single, governed entry point to connected context sources, with bring-your-own MCP servers and tool caching.
- Lens (beta): traces every outcome back to the skill, route, memory, and session behind it, with visibility into latency, success rates, and tokens per task.
- Agent Mesh (beta): keeps agents communicating over ephemeral streams, with automatic buffering and reconnection when a connection drops.
From prototype to production
According to Rowan Trollope, CEO of Redis, agents need the same foundations as apps and microservices: live application data, runtime state, and service communication. Iris first launched in May 2026 and is already used in production by customers such as Paradigm — June Lee, the company's CTO, said everything you see in Paradigm is stored in Redis.
Redis offers a free starting tier of 5,000 messages for Iris and will host live first-look demos with the engineering team on November 12 (Americas) and November 17 (EMEA).
Image credit: Redis Iris reference architecture diagram, official Redis material.
Sources: Redis — Agents Are Software: Introducing the Next Chapter of Redis Iris; Redis via PR Newswire — Redis Expands Redis Iris; Redis Iris — product page.
Transparency: this article was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence, based on public sources from the internet. See the original sources for more details.
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